Re: [office] List Proposal Vote Deadline on Wednesday

[Thomas Zander <zander@kde.org>]

On Tuesday 01 May 2007 22:23:21 Gary Edwards wrote:
> This has been a long and often contentious discussion.  It's also one
> of the most documented discussions the TC has ever recorded.  So much
> so that if ever the public wanted to know how things really work with
> the ODF specification, it's here for all to see.

I'd also like to extend the invitation to anyone that feels he needs it to 
explain things in private mail if they so wish.

I say this as I see a comment on the vote that raised my eyebrow this 
morning; it says this:
  " While i do believe that the Sun/KOffice List Enhancement proposal is 
creative and uniquely innovative, i don't believe we get to go back to 
square one and re invent the wheel; no matter how appealing, tempting, or 
application benefiting that might be. These issue were easier way back 
when, but once ODf 1.0 was released to the public, enhancements and 
changes to the specification demand consideration of larger 
responsibilities and expectations. The problem becomes that of doing 
everything we can at the specification level to encourage and accommodate 
innovative application features and advances; and do so without 
compromising our legacy obligations."

I can fully understand that the question before us is confusing due to the 
many many mails on the subject.
The choice A (sun/koffice proposal) is the result of months of work to
a) inventorize what OOo and KO have _actually_ been doing in 1.0 and 1.1
b) inventorize the featueset we want.
At this point we noticed that OOo and KO both had a subset of the wanted 
features, and did so in a non-exclusive manner (since they mostly used 
different tags for it)
c) write a proposal that joins the ideas of both suites (which in the end 
we not so different) which we now see before us.

This has the effect (though it can be missed at first glance) that the 1.2 
spec would be designed the way it should AND it would be perfectly 
backwards compatible with older ODF documents.  So I'm very proud of that 
achievement.

To be absolutely clear;  if the Novell proposal is accepted; all documents 
created in KOffice 1.x are useless (wrt the counters).  There is no 
possible way to fit them into the ODF concepts anymore and they need to 
be considered a different fileformat that needs to be converted to a new 
one. The Novell proposal makes it easier to convert WW documents to ODF, 
true. Just don't be confused that the KOffice/Sun proposal makes it 
harder. Its still possible in both proposals.

So, with regards to the above quote; the vote should be different based on 
the written goals.

Hope that clears things up.
-- 
Thomas Zander

PGP signature